Tag: Digital Native

Around 100 teenagers, between the ages of 12 and 18, agreed to withstand 72 hours totally offline: no phone, no computer, no TV. The University of Gdansk, together with Dbam o Mój Z@sięg Foundation, decided to run this experiment to estimate teenagers’ Internet addiction scale. A tech-survival for those who see unlimited web access as natural as water flowing in their tap. What were the results?

In today’s rapidly moving society, even the biggest bibliophiles have problems finding the time to sit down with a good book. Though we never stop reading. Tons of digital letters cross our eyes daily, from email to Twitter feed. So, why are kids still learning to read from a book? Amazon is reinventing the children’s book in the form of an educational reading app called Rapids.

Taking a selfie is not as obvious as it might seem. About five billion people, of the 7.4 living on our planet, don’t own a smartphone. These two boys use the nap of their flip-flop as a camera to take an imaginary selfie. Still, their selfie went viral and became our peculiar image of the week.

After the cucumber and the banana, there is a new phallic fruit in town. The eggplant emoji, also known as aubergine, was added to the official Unicode 6.0 emoji set in 2010. The flourishing ‘dictionary’ of 1.851 ideograms depicts a broad range of small digital icons to boost text messages and is gradually evolving into a parallel visual language of its own, where suggested meanings are up for grabs.

For parents under modern demands who are often away from home and miss that last special moment of the day, an app has appeared. Samsung just revealed the prototype version of Bedtime VR Stories, a technology that connects parents to their children in virtual reality, right before bedtime.

The use of smartphones is now ongoing and intense, especially among certain categories of the population. The addiction could becomes annoying when people are unable to disconnect even in a theater or at the movies. The urge to constantly take pictures or clips, chat or post on Facebook is what pushed American movie theater chain AMC Entertainment to introduce “text friendly” theaters. Strictly reserved to those who cannot stop texting.

How to explain the Next Nature philosophy to the next generations? Recently we’ve been reading, talking, interviewing and drawing to create a workshop to illustrate this concept to kids. We could hardly wait to test our ideas and see how much young people already know about technology and biology.

How would you solve your son’s addiction to video games? This father in China hired some professional gamers to find his son on online games and kill his avatar. To him the situation was unacceptable, his 23 years old son was unemployed and spent all day in front of the screen, in a virtual reality world.

In this technological era we have different models and customs. We used to be inspired by literature, nature and cultural traditions to name our children, but now this trend is shifting. According to the website babycenter.com among he most popular names of 2015 we can find Instagram filters. The most popular is Lux (75%), followed by Ludwig (42%), Juno (30%), and so on. This is the first time that technology breaks as an inspiration for names.

The Telegraph visited a controversial Chinese military-style boot camp where parents send their sons in the hope of break their internet addiction. China has more online gamers, 368 million, than the United States has people. Internet addiction is a real clinical disorder that afflicts 24 million of young Chinese people.